Automation has transformed incident response within individual teams. Diagnostic scripts, runbooks, and alert systems help engineers troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently.

Translating those gains across the organization remains a challenge. Most automations are built in silos and not designed to work together. The result: disconnected workflows, inconsistent outcomes, and too much manual effort, leaving teams with less time for the strategic work that drives innovation and resilience.

AI agents help you get the most out of automation, reducing toil and freeing your incident response teams to focus on higher-level priorities and innovation. They can plug into existing automations, make decisions, take actions, and escalate when needed.

What companies lose when automation islands persist

Consider a 503 error on a company’s web server. The employee who handles communication with AWS may have a diagnostic script ready to go, while others across operations have automated fixes for common causes like misconfigured settings or DDoS attacks. 

As it is, someone has to notice the issue, run the diagnostic, and then find and execute the correct runbook. Each instance might take just a few minutes, but multiplied across every incident and every team, those minutes add up fast.

Automation islands don’t just slow you down. They also disrupt your company’s ability to use resources efficiently. Incident response salaries and benefits cost organizations $1.9 million annually. When employees spend 38% of their time on manual processes, companies are paying $700,000 per year for work that could be automated. 

There’s also an opportunity cost. Employees who spend over a third of their time handling rote tasks have less time and energy to put toward innovative and productive work. 

Plus, workers sour on the concept of automation when it fails to free them from toil. Employers believe AI and automation will help teams achieve more; however, 65% of employees told Upwork they’re struggling to fulfill this expectation, and 47% have “no idea” how to reach their bosses’ desired productivity levels. 

Executives know AI and automation haven’t yet reached their full potential. Fifty-eight percent of leaders told us driving more automation is their top operational priority. According to over 70% of IT leaders, full automation is lacking for critical processes like:

• Mobilization of responders
• Remediation processes, including common or recurring issues
• Inter-team collaboration
• Communications with stakeholders, both internal and external

These are areas where AI agents could step in to streamline operations and save your teams time. 

Breaking the “island effect” with AI agents

As leading companies move to AI-first operations, they’re using agents to save time and strengthen their competitive edge.

Low-level, repetitive work—drudgery for human employees—is ideal for AI agents that can follow predetermined steps to achieve a desired outcome or address a problem. They’re the best solution for time-consuming manual tasks like:

• Running diagnostics
• Remediating well-understood incidents
• Surfacing triage information that spans sources
• Transcribing key incident response information

The impact of agents goes beyond simply completing individual tasks. Agents can connect them. For example, they can run a diagnostic and then, based on the results, automatically remediate the issue without requiring a human to manually execute each automation. At each step, agents handle repeatable, well-understood tasks, freeing humans to focus their expertise on novel problems that require strategic judgment and creativity. 

Breaking the “island effect” requires more than adding AI tools to your stack. It starts with understanding how work happens across your teams today. Map your incident response workflows, audit existing automations, and identify where agents can connect steps or close gaps. Prioritize quick wins to build momentum, and give teams space to experiment and deploy agents iteratively.

Agents can help—but only if they’re built to work across your existing systems and support the way your teams already operate. Getting there is easier with the right partner for AI-powered incident management.

AI agents built for operational excellence

PagerDuty has spent over a decade helping organizations run more reliable, resilient operations. Our AI is built on that experience, trained on more than 15 years of real-world operational data from billions of incidents across complex environments. That unique dataset gives our AI agents the context they need to recognize common patterns, anticipate issues, and help teams respond faster and more effectively.

It’s time to move beyond disconnected automation and build operations that work smarter, not harder, with AI at the forefront. Read The PagerDuty Vision for AI-First Operations to learn more.